Tuesday, April 28, 2009

BRAIN WASHING

Got to postpone Rache and talk about her tomorrow, and put my Wednesday Advice on Thursday ......

The busy bee commentators with their fly catchers swooping back and forth in the air, sooner or later catch a trend, a tale, a scandal. And a "maybe" and an "if" become a "when" and "why."

Whomp! The new t h i n g is caught. We're caught. A small story becomes a large one. A crime instantly gets people locking their windows, their doors. One look at a "maybe" murderer and he's guilty.

Look around! Be careful where you walk! For goodness sake, don't use Craig's List, in between measuring, percentagizing, grading our president, which is ... isn't really necessary but considering what we were overlooking for quite awhile, 100 days! Wow!

Is it, isn't it slightly deflating our swelling mounting concerns about torture, who did it, why, was it for a purpose other than getting us into a war?

Of course we're busy today with the flu epidemic of a long-ago war looming, ready to change all our plans for a night out, for socializing, going to school, or taking a vacation. Gathering numbers, numbers mounting, numbers being compared to other almost-but-not-quite epidemics.

(Remembering, of course, that masks can be bought at the drugstore, along with medication -- the supplies are OK -- where's the phone number of the doctor we'll call if ... symptoms abc or xyz appear.)

Of course we're not really worried, just wary.

WE KEEP UP WITH THE NEWS BECAUSE IT TELLS US WHAT TO BE CAREFUL OF, AND WHY NOT TO BE AFRAID, BUT... but ...

Well ...

We can handle it ... We're grown ups. I'm definitely a grownup. It's okay, it doesn't really hang us up, as long as we hang it on the clothes line -- it's spring -- it'll mostly dry, mostly evaporate in the sunshine!

HOW I GOT HERE

I started out as a modern dancer, contemporary, but balletic. I didn't want to be a swan, or a barefoot dancer. I wanted to dance to the music that thrilled me as a child, and made me want to be a dancer.

I began writing in the truck my first husband, Mark Ryder and I bought, in order to carry our set, props, and costumes for a long one-night-stands tour -- eighty-eighty performances in eighty-eight cities.

We were performing "Romeo and Juliet" nightly, but our marriage was breaking up. Every day while our stage manager drove us two-hundred miles or so to the next booking, I'd type a detailed description of last night -- what we did well, what we argued about, and a travelogue about the town, and comments from the people at the nightly party.

Recovering from the trip and the divorce, I sent my "car book" to a friend who said -- "Em, it's great,but ..." And that became rewrites, and another book. Then, my marriage to actor John Cullum, and then a play that got produced, and another book, big hopes because a famous agent loved it.The title and concept changed five times -- now it's been published, finally, as "Somebody, Woman of the Century." You can buy it, or read about it and my other five novels on Emily Frankel.com